Back to hometown

Above:  Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia.

My flight to Kuching leaves at 1405.  There are so many reasons to go to the airport early:  Christmas rush, possible flooding along the way, reduced bus and train schedules due to the pandemic.

I checked out from my hotel around 0900 and had a rather spicy thosai for breakfast.  It was 1400 in New Zealand news of the latest changes to the country’s MIQ (Managed Isolation and Quarantine) was streaming in.  This could affect my upcoming return to New Zealand in less than a week.

After breakfast, I took the 1000 bus to the airport.  It was meant to take an hour to KLIA2 and 1h15 to KLIA.  In reality, it only took an hour to the latter.  I noticed some flooding in some oil palm plantations along the way.

Arriving at the airport about 3h before departure, I was once again pleased that I didn’t have any luggage to check-in.  The bag-drop queue for Malaysia Airlines’ domestic flights snaked through the terminal.  If I were to straighten it, it would have spanned the width of the entire check-in hall.

I wandered a little before heading airside without any queueing hassles.  My priority now was to connect my laptop to the internet and find out about the latest changes to New Zealand’s MIQ:

• I would now have to do managed isolation in a hotel for 10 day instead of the previous arrangement of 7 days followed by 3 days at home and a test in the community.  This was effectively nearly immediately.
• The pre-departure test timeframe of 72h has been reduced to 48h.  I realised later it would take effect more than a week after my arrival in New Zealand and wouldn’t affect me.

Fortunately, these changes didn’t impact me very much or my proposed travel to Lake Benmore straight after my isolation.

My flight left on time.  Upon take-off I could see suburbs that were still flooded.  I’ve had friends tell me that they’ve never seen such heavy and prolonged rainfall in their entire lives living in the capital.

Text continues after this gallery.

Even though we arrived at Kuching on time around 1600, the disembarkation process by four rows at a time, held us up a fair bit.  The health declaration check and immigration processing was swift.

Once outside around 1630, I had trouble summoning a Grab car.  Prices were exorbitant and there were no takers.  I downloaded a competitor app called Maxim.  I was able to up my price and drivers were also able to “demand” higher prices.  Through this process, I managed to get ride for less than Grab.

I did have to wait for about 15 mins for the car to arrive though.  Combined with rush hour traffic, the ride took about an hour and I reached my apartment around 1800.

Despite having had a great time diving in Sabah and eating in the peninsular, I was pleased to be back.  With Covid-19, travel can be unpredictable.  At any point, I could have been caught up in a location of interest and may be required to quarantine.  These days, things are a bit more relaxed and non-symptomatic casual contacts are fine to continue their daily lives.

It’s now time for me to focus on getting back to New Zealand.  Hopefully there are no unexpected rule changes in the next five days.